DO WOMEN LACK VISION?

This question was raised, yet one more time, at a recent event featuring a panel of senior executive women at The Boston Club, an organization that advocates for women directors and helps companies place women on boards.

The panel included Laura Sen, CEO, BJ’s wholesale club; Willow Shire, Board Director, TJX; and Gunjan Kedia, Executive Vice President State Street Bank. In response to the question about whether women lack vision, panel moderator, Deborah Kolb, PhD, Simmons College, School of Management, pointed out potential flaws in research on this topic.

In Women and the Vision Thing  (Harvard Business Review) Herminia Ibarra concludes,

“Women scored lower on “envisioning”—the ability to recognize new opportunities and trends in the environment and develop a new strategic direction for an enterprise.”

This conclusion was based on 360 ratings by peers of the female research subjects. Why is this important? Peer ratings tend to be lower than those of other rater groups, including managers and direct reports. For this reason, the Emotional Competence Inventory, a well-validated 360 assessment, adjusts the weight of peer group scores. To conclude that women lack vision, based solely on evidence from peer group ratings, seems a bit on the light side, in my not so humble opinion.

In addition, questions about women lacking vision and strategic thinking, may grow from a limited perspective about what vision and strategy look like and how they are expressed. Other Boston Club panelists pointed out how challenging it is for some to hold the notion that women (or any person) can be good with details and strategy simultaneously, or even sequentially. A discussion of gender based brain differences explains why and how women do both, later in this post.

A Different Perspective on Vision

For now, let’s take a leap to Pinterest, where ideas are expressed in pictures, and explore a different way of viewing whether women lack vision. In a recent post at 3Plus International, Vicki Daly wrote that women make up 70 – 80% of Pinterest’s users.

Pinterest is a visual expression of how and what users are thinking. And if a vision isn’t a picture, what is it?

Google+ enables ideas to be expressed in words, and over there, men account for two-thirds of the 90 million users.

Men are for words? Women are for pictures?

As Pinterest grows by leaps and bounds, people are asking whether it is just a fad or a serious player in the social ehter-spehre. Time will tell. And while time takes its time, I wonder whether women are pinning, in part, because it allows us to express our ideas in both words and visions, which is more aligned with how we think.

The evidence for this?

Picture Her Brain

According to Ellen F. Weber, PhD, Director of MITA International Brain Based Center, there are structural differences between men’s and women’s brains. These differences are such that women access and integrate more areas of the brain to solve problems – which is the brain’s highest level function.  Men, on the other hand, tend to use a logical step by step analysis. Women solve problems by way of logical analysis, pictures, metaphors, emotions and more. Each of these methods taps a different intelligence and a different area of the brain.

I often think in pictures. It happened the other day when Charlotte was talking about a new man in her life. Into my brain flew an image of Charlotte swimming deep underwater. I shared the image and wondered with Charlotte why this particular image might be coming to mind? She responded that the relationship is taking her places she has long been afraid to go – her fear of deeply intimate relationships – well below the surface.

More Myth Busters

Moving away from Pinterest, the brain, and back to the business world, here are a few examples of women with vision.

Spanx, The Pampered Chef and Rubber Sidewalks are three successful companies started by women who saw needs that others did not notice. Then we have Judy Faulkner, founder of e-health company EPIC Systems, dubbed “Health Care’s Low Key Billionaire” in Forbes. For additional examples dubunking the myth that women lack vision see How She Does It: How Women Entrepreneurs Are Changing the Rules of Business Success by Margaret Heffernan.

The Female Vision: Women’s Real Power at Work by Sally Helgesen and Julie Johnshon is another excellent resource for understanding what and how women see differently, and why businesses benefit when leaders open their eyes to this difference.

Are you, or do you know, a woman with vision?

Please share your story here, and my apologies that the comment section does not allow you to post a picture. Perhaps a woman should design an app that does.